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4.25.2013

Ten years after the discovery of remains of a 15 cm strange humanoide, it was confirmed that it is actually a human. According to the team working on the project Sirius, is the conclusion of scientists from Stanford and was presented in a new documentary.

Since the small humanoid - known as Atacama Humanoid and treated by Ata - was discovered in the Atacama Desert in Chile for 10 years, has been much speculation about its origins.
Advanced theories included that the bones were from an aborted fetus, a monkey, or, for some, even an extraterrestrial being.

In the weeks leading up to the premiere of the documentary Sirius UFO enthusiasts have increased the belief that the film could announce a breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.

This is because the small skeleton certainly has many of the features we have come to believe to be aliens - in particular, a large head on a small body.

But the documentary reveals that a DNA sample was extracted from the bone marrow of the little being analyzed by scientists of the famous Stanford University.
The conclusion is that it is an "interesting mutation" of a human male who have survived from six to eight years after the birth.

"I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human - closer to human than chimpanzees. He lived until the age between six and eight years, "said Garry Nolan, director of biology at the School of Medicine at Stanford University in California.

"The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allow us to determine, in a very short time, it is actually a human," Nolan says in the documentary. And it is, to dismay of many.

The documentary premiered in Los Angeles in the past Earth Day, April 22 - from now on will be released online and in cinemas around the world.

4.24.2013

Scientists Richard Gordon and Alexei Sharov have suggested that if the rate of increase in the complexity of biological systems in the course of evolutionary history followed Moore's Law then life existed before the Earth was formed.

Moore's Law posits that the complexity of computers increases exponentially at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every two years.

Theoretical calculations based on Moore's Law yield results that coincide with the invention of the first microchips in the 1960s.

Geneticist Richard Gordon of Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, basing their calculations on the premise that genetic complexity of living systems double every 376 million years, projected the origin of life back to almost 10 billion years ago. Geologists believe the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. If Gordon and Sharov's projections based on Moore's law have any valid basis, it means that life is older than the Earth by 5.5 billion years.

This leads to the suggestion that life arose elsewhere in the universe and migrated to the Earth after it was formed.

The public will be able to fly along with NASA's Voyager spacecraft as the twin probes head towards interstellar space, which is the space between stars. As indicated in this artist's concept, a regularly updated gauge using data from the two spacecraft will indicate the levels of particles that originate from far outside our solar system and those that originate from inside our solar bubble. Those are two of the three signs scientists expect to see in interstellar space. The other sign is a change in the direction of the magnetic field. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A gauge on the Voyager home page, http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov, tracks levels of two of the three key signs scientists believe will appear when the spacecraft leave our solar neighborhood and enter interstellar space.

When the three signs are verified, scientists will know that one of the Voyagers has hurtled beyond the magnetic bubble the sun blows around itself, which is known as the heliosphere.

The gauge indicates the level of fast-moving charged particles, mainly protons, originating from far outside the heliosphere, and the level of slower-moving charged particles, also mainly protons, from inside the heliosphere. If the level of outside particles jumps dramatically and the level of inside particles drops precipitously, and these two levels hold steady, that means one of the spacecraft is closing in on the edge of interstellar space. These data are updated every six hours.

This map shows the distribution of water in the stratosphere of Jupiter as measured with the Herschel space observatory. Image credit: Water map: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al.; Jupiter image: NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University)

Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter's stratosphere, an intermediate atmospheric layer, was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which famously struck the planet in 1994.

The findings, based on new data from the Herschel space observatory, reveal more water in Jupiter's southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in the north. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

The origin of water in the upper atmospheres of the solar system's giant planets has been debated for almost two decades. Astronomers were quite surprised at the discovery of water in the stratospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which dates to observations performed with ESA's Infrared Space Observatory in 1997.

While the source of water in the lower layers of their atmospheres can be explained as internal, the presence of this molecule in their upper atmospheric layers is puzzling due to the scarcity of oxygen there. Its supply must have an external origin. Since then, astronomers have investigated several possible candidates that may have delivered water to these planets, from icy rings and satellites to interplanetary dust particles and cometary impacts.

Scientists eagerly await the arrival of a recently discovered, highly active comet that will skim 730,000 miles above the Sun's surface on Nov. 28 and has the potential to be readily visible from Earth.

Comet C/2012 S1. Credit: Nasa/ESA/PSI

The comet, C/2012 S1 (ISON), is highly unusual in that it comes to the inner solar system for the first time and will skirt around the Sun within less than two solar radii from the Sun's surface on Nov. 28.

Comet C/ISON was discovered in September 2012 when it was farther away from the Sun than Jupiter, and was already active at such a great distance. This is distinct from most other sungrazers - comets that pass extremely close to the sun - that are only discovered and remain visible for several hours nearest the Sun. At such a close perihelion distance from the Sun, sungrazers are expected to be intensely heated by the Sun, and sublimate not only ice but also silicates and even metals, releasing a tremendous amount of dust. The expectation is high that Comet C/ISON will be much brighter and more spectacular than most other sungrazers when it puts on a show late this year.

Officials at the Yale Peabody Museum confirmed that a meteorite struck a home in Wolcott at the end of last week.

The Wolcott Police Department said local resident Larry Beck called them before 10:30 a.m. Saturday and said a baseball-sized rock crashed through his Williams Court home the night before.

Beck said the rock caused damage to his roof, copper piping and cracked the ceiling in his kitchen before coming to a stop.

"It sounded like a gunshot but it was louder bang," Beck said. "We looked up and saw the ceiling coming down and broke away the sheet rock in the dining room."

Beck reported to police he heard the rock crash through his home Friday at 10:30 p.m., but thought that a joint or rafter had been broken.

When he checked the attic the following morning, he said he found the hole in his roof, the damage to the pipes and the rock.

He said the rock had broken in half.

"For this to crash through asphalt shingles, the roof, smash copper pipe, crack a ceiling, it was moving very quickly," said Wolcott police Chief Edward Stephens.

It was believed that the rock was possibly a broken piece of airport runway concrete that had dropped from an aircraft when the landing gear was being lowered because, Beck said, there is a lot of airport traffic over his home at all hours of the day and night.

4.15.2013

The National Space Society (NSS) applauds the new NASA budget item that
would provide close to $100 million for a mission to rendezvous with a
small asteroid and move it into orbit around the Moon where it could
later be visited by astronauts.

"An asteroid capture mission is a tremendously important mission, and
one that could not be more relevant to the challenges our civilization
faces today," said Mark Hopkins, Chairman of the NSS Executive
Committee. "Robotic asteroid capture is the first step to exploiting the
vast material resources of the solar system for a hopeful and
prosperous future for mankind."

Notes NSS Executive Vice President Paul Werbos, "Even small asteroids
contain tremendous wealth-precious metals, rare strategic metals
important for sustainable development, raw materials for in-space
construction, and volatiles for life support and propulsion in space."